The following year, in 1953, Hubert became the Chaplain All Saints at Eastbourne Hospital in Sussex. Over the next 6 years he would work alongside the famous serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams. For those who are unaware of Dr John Bodkin Adams, he was believed to be the Harold Shipman of his age. He would usually prey upon his more elderly patients, convincing them to put him in their wills, of which over 130 complied. They were soon given an injection by Bodkin Adams, and would conveniently pass away of ‘natural causes’ soon after. On review more than 165 of the deaths that Dr Bodkin Adams oversaw were seen as suspicious. The suspicion was not a well kept secret amongst staff at Eastbourne Hospital, most of the nurses had voiced their concerns to their superiors. They were believed to have been ignored on purpose, as the newly founded NHS was considered to be under political threat and a scandal that could see a general practitioner sentenced to death was to be avoided at all cost. The problem was Dr Bodkin Adams just couldn’t stop himself. He was being protected by Lord Gwynne who was believed to be his secret gay lover, and was an extremely well connected politician.

Hubert Brasier would have given last rights to many of those killed by Adams, he may have even taken confession from Bodkin Adams himself, who when asked by the press if he was guilty of stealing from old women said ‘I have made my peace with God over that’.

According to Adam Hochschild about some anti-war heroes from nearly a century ago

It was in Britain that significant numbers of war resisters first acted on their beliefs and paid the price. They did not even come close to stopping the bloodshed, but their strength of conviction remains one of the glories of a dark time. By the conflict’s end, more than 20,000 British men of military age would refuse the draft. Many, on principle, also refused the noncombatant alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, and more than 6,000 served prison terms under harsh conditions: hard labor, a bare-bones diet, and a strict “rule of silence.” This was one of the largest groups ever jailed for political reasons in a Western democracy. War opponents behind bars also included older men—and a few women—as well. If we could time-travel our way into British prisons in late 1917 and early 1918 we would meet the nation’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize, more than half a dozen future members of Parliament, one future cabinet minister, and a former newspaper editor who was now publishing a clandestine journal for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. It would be rare to find a more distinguished array of people ever imprisoned together.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The problem is that, at heart, we are not rational creatures. We are intensely emotional creatures. Our beliefs are of an emotional nature; it is only when we try to convince others of the superiority of our ideas that we try use reason. But it is even more complicated than that. Most of our emotions are hidden from us. Yes, we are aware of those few emotions that break through to our conscious awareness, but they are just the tip of our emotional iceberg, the great bulk of our emotional entity is hidden below awareness. So we are at the mercy of forces we cannot even directly measure.

But, judging by advertisements and Republican political campaigns, if you really want to convince someone, reason is not actually a very effective tactic. We should apply reason, not against other people’s beliefs, but against our own.

Because we tend to believe what we want to believe, don’t ask yourself “Why do I believe this?”, but instead “Why do I want to believe this?” On the surface, maybe it seems, “No, I don’t want to believe that, I’m forced to by the reality of this world.” Look harder, and you’ll realize that it’s seldom the case. We believe things for motives.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Madhusree Mukerjee has shown recently how Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine of 1943. She describes here how this was largely the consequence of heeding advice from a “trusted old friend”, physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann and his assistant Donald MacDougall.

Consider the following perverted science that Lindemann advocated in lectures in the early 1930s. According to Madhusree Mukerjee

He had detailed a science-based solution to a challenge that occupied many an intellect of the time: preserving for eternity the hegemony of the superior classes. Any attempt “to force upon Nature an equality she has never admitted” was bound to lead to bloody strife, the scientist asserted in a draft of this talk. Instead of subscribing to what he called “the fetish of equality,” he recommended that human differences be accepted and indeed enhanced by means of science. It was no longer necessary, he wrote, to wait for “the haphazard process of natural selection to ensure that the slow and heavy mind gravitates to the lowest form of activity.” New technologies such as surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations would one day allow humans to be fine-tuned for specific tasks. Society could create “gladiators or philosophers, athletes or artists, satyrs or monks” at will—indeed, it could manufacture “men with a passion and perhaps even aptitude for any desired vocation.” At the lower end of the race and class spectrum, one could remove from “helots” (the Greek word for slaves) the ability to suffer or to feel ambition.

“Somebody must perform dull, dreary tasks, tend machines, count units in repetition work; is it not incumbent on us, if we have the means, to produce individuals without a distaste for such work, types that are as happy in their monotonous occupation as a cow chewing the cud?” Lindemann asked. Science could yield a race of humans blessed with “the mental make-up of the worker bee.” This subclass would do all the unpleasant work and not once think of revolution or of voting rights: “Placid content rules in the bee-hive or ant-heap.” The outcome would be a perfectly peaceable and stable society, “led by supermen and served by helots.”

Maritain’s philosophy and personalism proved especially important for a group of left-leaning Christian Democratic thinkers involved in drafting the Italian Constitution, in particular the young intellectuals Giorgio La Pira (who was to become the mayor of Florence) and Giuseppe Dossetti of the Catholic University in Milan. Avid readers of both Maritain and Mounier, they criticized individualistic liberalism and saw the person as always embedded in community, or, as La Pira put it: “The human person unfolds through organic belonging to the successive social communities in which it is contained and via which it steadily develops and perfects itself.”